Louisa (39 page)

1

W
INTER
WAS
STUBBORN
.
Storms came in quick succession, and wet snow still covered the ground in mid-March. For weeks, thin traces of ice lay in the shade. But by the end of March 1829, Louisa could write to Charles, who was up in Boston, that it was “almost summer,” describing the chirrups of hidden frogs and the reviving hum of insects. By the beginning of April, the fields were patched with color, fresh with the green scent of new grass. Spring blossoms broke from dead branches. Cascades of white flowers tumbled from the horse chestnuts. Strong shoots pushed out of the mud, and yellow forsythia erupted like laughter. Louisa shook off the cold that had numbed her. “Like a grasshopper,” she had once written of herself, “I sing my hour according to the degree of heat.”

At the beginning of March
, she and John Quincy, along with John and Mary, their daughter Mary Louisa (whom they called Louisa), and a few servants had moved into a mansion on Meridian Hill, located on the original centerline of the District of Columbia. The very stone that marked the longitude stood on the house's land. Louisa could have walked due south from its central door to the iron gate of the White House. From the crest of the hill she could look south and
see the White House's boxy shape a mile and a half away. But that was the last place she wanted to go. She had no desire to get any closer.

She heard stories
of how a crowd of people overwhelmed the reception at the President's House after Andrew Jackson's inauguration. Office seekers, shopkeepers, farmers, senators, and children had pushed past one another into the parlors. Men had climbed in and out of the reception through open windows. With mud and slush clinging to their boots, they stood atop the damask chairs, the very chairs she had so carefully chosen. The drapes were torn, and when the waiters appeared with tubs of spiked orange punch, the surge of the crowd had knocked over her cut glass—now the new president's cut glass—and the glass had shattered on the floor. She had heard, too, that Jackson was removing federal appointees and replacing them with supporters of his campaign. “Rumor has again set forth her hundred tongues and each tongue announces a dismissal,” Louisa wrote to George. Jackson had even fired her servants and brought in his slaves. Only the Giustas, who had come with the Adamses from Europe, remained, and they were permitted to keep their jobs only on the condition that they not speak to their former employers. “We are in a state of banishment,” Louisa wrote. The Adamses were being blamed for the death of Andrew Jackson's wife, Rachel; Jackson's supporters said that she had died from the strain of the slander against her. Louisa, though, mourned the woman's death. “I learnt the pangs the malignity of slander can inflict not to pity one so severely oppressed,” she wrote to Charles.

She kept all
of this in the distance, though still in view. She made no visits to anyone in the city. Though the Adamses had once socialized with friends and opponents alike, no one from the new administration, except for Martin Van Buren, now secretary of state, came to visit them. Meridian Hill seemed a kind of exile—which Louisa liked. It was like Little Boston had been in Ealing, a kind of oasis—a place to be a family once more. Though the house was only rented, she wrote that the family was “forming a home of real domestic comfort.” It had
been a long time since she worried about “good housewifery,” she admitted, years since she superintended the meals, the laundry, and the small trials of daily life. There was a time—she could remember it too well—when her incompetence caused her husband annoyance and herself great pain. Now, though, “we laugh at my blunders,” she said, and the laughter was cheerful. She was delighted with the place and confident enough to call herself its mistress. The house was large and tasteful, with separate wings for John's family and her own, connected by large sliding doors that separated two elegant parlors on the south side. There were “very pretty” bed chambers, a long gallery, good closets, and a large room in a garret, where she had placed “the offensive billiard table” that John Quincy had bought for the White House, which the opposition press had pointed to as evidence that the president was gambling and abusing public funds after John, as secretary, had mislabeled the account. She could joke about that now. Spread out over the estate were cellars, stables, a dairy, an icehouse, servants' chambers, a laundry, a washhouse, a kitchen garden, flower beds, a nursery for new trees. Yellowwood trees lined a long graceful drive to the estate. There was a farmhouse and woods, and more than a hundred acres of land. John Quincy's study overlooked a little flower garden and the plant nursery.

“The ex-President I think enjoys himself in his little study . . . infinitely more than I ever remember him to have done since I have been married,” Louisa wrote to Charles.

Since leaving the glare
of the President's House, her husband had grown brighter and bigger in her eyes. “Your father leaves them all far behind and displays that real yet true dignity that seeks no occasions for ostentatious display but commands the respect of all who approach him,” she wrote. “Conscious rectitude is a shield which no arms are powerful enough to destroy.” Charles reminded her that she had been furious with him, despairing about his plans for Quincy. She half pretended not to know what her son was talking about. “I have totally
forgotten,” she responded, adding, “Your father is as kind as possible and appears desirous of doing everything in his power to make me comfortable.”

Her granddaughter, Mary Louisa, was often in her arms. She was amazed at the change that marriage and fatherhood had produced in her son John. “He is active steadily industrious and much more cheerful than for years,” Louisa told Charles. As for herself, she knew that she was also in a new state. She was rarely sick anymore. “I am always busy about nothing and have no time to think of my health which certainly is no worse if it does not improve.” She knew that eventually she and John Quincy would have to head north to the Old House, but she did not dwell on when. John Quincy began to talk about buying Meridian Hill. She did not, it seems, object.

She wrote to George, “You have no conception how happily we live here.”

 • • • 

A
LETTER
ARRIVED
from Charles in the first week of April. It was about George. George was not doing well, Charles said. He had withdrawn from his friends; he was languishing; he needed some sort of excitement, some spur for his career and his spirits. This came as no surprise to Louisa. She had been feeling distant from her oldest son for a year. Their correspondence had fallen off. They were like “floating icebergs,” she wrote. She had already tried to thaw the freeze, but she recognized it would take time. She couldn't say whether the fault was hers or his, but it no longer mattered. “One of the pleasures most earnestly anticipated by me is the renewed and affectionate intercourse of my sons,” she had written to him on April 1. Her concern for him was an unceasing current in her mind—sometimes fast, sometimes slow. She had always had great hopes for her firstborn, but most of all she just wanted George to be well.

“With all his nonsense he is a glorious creature,” she told her son
John the year before, “and should he fail to get over the singular waywardness of his nature he will still be all I wish and desire.”

On April 8
, after receiving Charles's letter, she wrote to George again and urged him to come to Washington. In her letter, she was gentle and kind. She gave no hint that she had been prompted by Charles, no echo of Charles's concern. She simply said that she and John Quincy would need his help in moving to Massachusetts, and before that time came, they wanted him with them in Washington. She offered many inducements. “[O]ur little ménage goes on so quietly and modestly and I think I never saw your father so mild and so pleasant and take such a general interest in what is going on among us as he does now,” she wrote. If he came, he could save money on rent. He could have a comfortable room. He would have freedom. “Your father will probably keep a horse and gig and you will always command the use of it,” she wrote. After she signed her name, she added, “If you come you will see our pretty baby.”

George agreed immediately, and Louisa was relieved. She was seriously worried, but she imagined that at Meridian Hill he might find, as she had found, some hope for the future. “It is probable,” she wrote to Charles, that George will “begin a new life when with us.”

She expected him
to reach the house on Saturday, May 2. But at around one o'clock that same afternoon, Louisa's brother-in-law Nathaniel Frye appeared at the door instead. He asked whether John Quincy had received any letters. That morning Nathaniel had read an announcement in the
Baltimore American
that somewhere between Providence and New York, before sunrise on Thursday morning, George Adams had gone overboard the steamboat the
Benjamin Franklin
. About half an hour later John Quincy's cousin Judge William Cranch arrived with three letters confirming the death.

John Quincy was the one who told Louisa. Her condition, he wrote in his diary afterward, “is not to be described.” The doctor was summoned to see her, “but there was no medicine for this wound.”

 • • • 

O
VER
THE
NEXT
FEW
DAYS
, John Quincy read the newspaper accounts of the death and spoke with another passenger. He pieced together a story of what had happened, a story that he could accept, a story about his son's death that would let him live on. “I see the causes of it distinctly,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. George was seasick. The jostling of the boat “had produced a fever with a rushing of blood to the brain.” He had asked the captain to be put on shore so that he might be bled. George was cheerful with other passengers. He gave a missionary a little money. But he was under a great strain, John Quincy wrote in his diary, and his mind snapped. George's fellow passenger told John Quincy that George imagined that the other passengers were laughing at him. He imagined that the birds were speaking to him. He imagined that the steamboat engine was speaking to him, saying “Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.” In the middle of the night, George again asked the captain to put him ashore, saying that the other passengers were conspiring against him. Not long afterward, his hat was found on deck, and then his coat.

His corpse would
be found a month later. John Quincy went to meet the body. “His watch and small pocketbook were still in their places, and his name yet legible within his boots,” he wrote to Louisa.

John Quincy's diary returned continually to his concern for his wife. “Human suffering can go but one degree beyond what she endures,” he wrote. He prayed for mercy. He prayed to God that she would not see herself as Job. “Let her not say, My God! My God! why hast thou forsaken me?” She was, somehow, able to rise from her bed and leave the bedroom. He was amazed by her resilience, which he thought stronger than his own. But at night the fevers would come. When she tried to come down to dinner, she fainted. She begged John Quincy not to listen to anything she said during those days, fearful that her words were deranged by her grief. For a second time, she had
lost her child, and yet again she thought she might be driven mad. She was also afraid that she would blame her husband for their son's death. Afterward, she wrote a short and strange statement in her diary in which she said, “The idea struck me after I became more composed; that as human nature is ever prone to think ill; that I might perhaps be thought to have some secret uneasiness that I was fearful of exposing.” She wrote it to deny it. She wanted, she said, “to declare that I had no terror of conscience or of guilt, but only the apprehension of expressing some
regrets
, that might have increased the anguish of us all.” There is no better evidence, of course, that she really did have some secret uneasiness—about suicide, about the stigma, about her husband's culpability, about her own—than this sad statement.